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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I'm not sure if I understand the question. If you mean "has it ever been alleged that a murder was committed for the specific purpose of filming it for commercial release?", I believe the answer is no. My understanding is that every alleged "snuff film" turns out to fail one of the two criteria: either it isn't a real murder but just an unusually convincing special effects job; or it is a real murder, but it wasn't filmed specifically for commercial release (e.g. ISIS and cartel beheading videos are intended to be released but not sold; serial killers filming their kills but never intending to release them at all).

But if you're asking "has a murder ever been committed for the purpose of filming it?", I think essentially all ISIS or cartel beheading videos meet that description. Or at least filming the murder (in order to publicly release it and hopefully intimidate one's opponents) is a primary purpose, along with the immediate purpose of killing the person who currently finds himself on the business end of your machete. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the people filmed being murdered by ISIS or a cartel did absolutely nothing to antagonise either group: the group just found themselves falling behind schedule in their content creation pipeline and the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now that I think about it, there are reasonable examples of murder committed for the purpose of filming it. And in those narrow cases, it would make sense to prosecute the channels distributing it. Publicizing ISIS beheading videos seems pretty bad to me! And certainly Livestream killers should be taken down.

But the contrast with CP still stands: while murder-for-content isn't impossible, it's less common than molestation for content, and certainly less common than filming molestation in order to sell or barter it. Prosecuting CP more plausibly reduces molestation, than prosecuting snuff films will reduce the murder rate.

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